Sophy Roberts has won the travel book of the year prize in the 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for A Training School for Elephants (Penguin). It’s a book in which she follows in the footsteps of four elephants shipped in the 19th century from India to the East African coast and then marched inland to the Congo — all part of King Leopold of Belgium’s plan to train African elephants and use them to crack open the continent.
The prize for fiction with a sense of place has gone to Dur e Aziz Amna for A Splintering (Duckworth). Set in rural Pakistan against a backdrop of political violence and natural disaster, it traces the struggle of a woman stuck between province and metropolis, between motherhood and ambition.
For the full list of winners, see the Stanfords site.